Lively Thought

One of the great quotations that liberals love to pull out of their hats it this one from John Stuart Mill: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

That’s one of the reasons our reaction to Sarah Palin is so natural. She fits neatly into the stereotype we hold of conservatives as backwards, backwoods, bible-thumpers who have no interest in, or understanding of, national issues or global politics, let alone the philosophical underpinnings on their own beliefs.

The stereotypes we hold about conservatives are constantly reinforced by blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh who spout idiocy that appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: fear, ignorance and selfishness. We listen to these men and imagine our idiot, racist, sexist, homophobic uncles cackling with glee at having their worldview reflected back at them and justified. (This is our image of typical McCain supporters.) Even though we run into intelligent thoughtful people who are conservatives and who dismiss Bill-O and Rush as slavering populists who have nothing to do with their movement, we just can’t imagine being on the same team as the vast population of stupid folks that make up the conservative base.

The man we want to stand with is Mill.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik outlines Mill’s life by way of reviewing British journalist Richard Reeves’s book, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mill’s life is that he was, in a way, the Mozart of philosophy:

Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary. Latin, Greek, ancient history, political economy: “By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat his examinations for university entrance.

A childhood robbed of all child-like things is sad to contemplate. Though it did produce a great mind, there were consequences. Mill plunged into a two-year-long depression at the age of twenty. He couldn’t write or work. He took refuge in music and poetry, particularly the romantics, and that finally lead him out of the darkness.

Gopnik’s training as an art historian shows through in one of the best parts of the essay where he describes how the influence of art lead Mill towards conservatism at this point in his life.

His love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.

As Mill emerged from his depression though, and started to consume the works of Continental philosophers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, he turned his mind to the idea that we should all have the right to build the best world for ourselves that we can, according to our own ideals. He would become the paragon of liberal thought, an advocate of individual rights, the rights of women, and a fierce opponent of slavery of every kind. On every issue of his day, and even in ours, Mill stands as a hero whose advocacy was generations ahead of its time.

However, Mill’s life, it seems, would always be sad and complicated. The great early feminist Harriet Taylor was the love of his life, but she was married to another man for the first twenty years they knew each other. They were married when Harriet’s husband died, but as Gopnik notes:

John and Harriet’s intellectual idyll was long-lived in shadow, short-lived in sunlight. Mr. Taylor died in 1849, and in 1851 John and Harriet were married. But after only seven and a half years Harriet died of one of those sad, unnamed wasting diseases that blighted the period. Mill had a monument—of the same Carrara marble as Michelangelo’s David—constructed for her in Avignon, with an inscription that included the lines “Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers / this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.” That same month, Mill sent off to the publisher the finished manuscript of “On Liberty,” dedicating it to the memory of “the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement.” (Darwin was finishing “On the Origin of Species” that same year, and also saw it published the next; the two books remain the bedrock of the liberal age.)

At the time of Mill’s own death, he was not highly regarded. He had entered politics after Harriet’s death and he was regularly jeered for his radical views in parliament. The press mocked him for his feminism and obstinant stance against slavery. He did have some followers amongst the lower-classes however.

His working-class admirers helped raise a statue to him on the Thames Embankment. But Mill asked to be interred in a remote French town. Five people came to his burial. This was the one place he wanted to be, with Harriet, in the tiny cemetery outside Avignon, where he could rest beside the one love he had had. In the end, it was all he knew.

I always think it fitting somehow that the lives of great men (and women) are so often sad. Their greatness would almost be too much to contemplate if they didn’t also have to pay a worldly price for it. In the end, isn’t that the story of Christianity as well?

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